


i miss our little talks

by litteringfire (heartrapier)



Category: Cardfight!! Vanguard
Genre: Age Difference, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Pushing Daisies Fusion, M/M, there are deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 13:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14081790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartrapier/pseuds/litteringfire
Summary: Chrono holds onto sentimentality like one would money: hoards them, keeps them in a box, hides them from harm.Instead, Chrono tries not to scream out his next words. “Pleasedon’t tell me it’sKoujiIbuki.”Something flickers in Tokoha’s eyes, and she seems unable to stop the flash of pity on her face. Chrono’s knuckles fall onto his lap.a pushing daisies fusion, with chrono as the pie-maker, tokoha as his private investigator friend, and ibuki, who is—without a doubt, no questions asked—dead.





	i miss our little talks

**Author's Note:**

> title from of monsters and men's little talks
> 
> i wrote this in one spurt in like. 8 hours and during my sleeping hours so.  
> warnings for death mentions, panic attacks, dark humour (?), a mess of tenses, and also that pie pun. if you find something else you want me to tag/warn, please tell me.

Without a knock, and with quick, short steps and her long coat bellowing behind her, Tokoha throws herself over half the counter and into Chrono’s face, almost colliding. “We have a case.”

Chrono blinks, spine bent backwards. He catches Kumi’s chuckle from one of the tables. “I thought we agreed to spread out the morgue visits so that the coroner wouldn’t get too suspicious.” He says, sparing a glance at his kitchen. He’s barely managed to stuff the last strawberry pie in the oven. “It’s only been five days since the last one.”

“I know, I know.” Tokoha grimaces, relaxes onto one of the stools. “I swear that creepy coroner’s smile gets wider the more we visit, but anyway. We can’t chance missing out on this one.”

Chrono sighs. He wipes his hands with a towel and slides onto the seat across the bar. “What’s the reward this time?”

“His whole wealth.” Tokoha says. She looks to Kumi, and from whatever it is she seems to mouth to her, the waitress understands. “The victim’s, I meant. Apparently knew he was going to get killed and left a note. Even had a lawyer to authenticate that claim for him. The whole treasure is in a bank.”

Eyebrows raised, Chrono says, a hint of intrigue in his voice. “And did he? Really get murdered?”

Tokoha shrugs. “Reports said it was electrocution. Unless it was an accident, tripped on his own feet and into a live wire or something.” Kumi struts over to hand her the milkshake she seems to have ordered.

Chrono hums. “And we can’t wait for another day to meet his corpse? Maybe we’ll get lucky and it won’t be that coroner’s shift.”

Rolling her eyes, Tokoha sighs. “You know only he would take our bribing. Also, the victim had no registered next of kin, and his note indicated he wanted to be cremated, ashes and all— _hear this—_ within the week of his death. He was really out there doing everything to leave nothing behind.”

“Won’t his treasure—wealth, money, whatever—stay, though? Doesn’t seem thorough to me.” Chrono says, but he is already untying his apron. “What if no one could find his murderer?”

“Who knows. Maybe he had something in mind. He sounded like a dude with some hidden agenda.” Tokoha says, slipping off the stool and onto her heels. “Do you want to drive or do I?”

Chrono shrugs and lets his private investigator friend decide, putting on a jacket and rolling the sleeves. He turns to warn Kumi to be careful with the restaurant while he’s on leave, and in response the waitress waves him off and tells him not to worry. It’s not unusual that he would leave whenever Tokoha brings in a case, anyway, and that happens every few weeks. They exit the restaurant, a pie specialty called Pie Leap that Chrono has been manning for his aunt, and glide into Tokoha’s car.

“So, do you know the victim? Some secret millionaire?” Chrono asks as he buckles his seatbelt and leans back on the seat. Maybe it’s one of those politicians—who else would be a target for murder, moreover aware that they were, indeed, being targeted, and then somehow still managed to leave a convoluted inheritance message?

“Never heard of his name, actually.” Tokoha says, nose scrunched up, and shifts the gear. “Someone called Ibuki.”

Chrono feels as if something has punctured his lungs. He unconsciously grips at the side of his car door, knuckles turning white. “Ibuki?” he gasps out.

Tokoha stops, pressing on the brake so suddenly that if she hadn’t only started the car mere seconds ago, she could have flung Chrono and his hair into the dashboard. “Do you know of him?”

Instead, Chrono tries not to scream out his next words. “ _Please_ don’t tell me it’s _Kouji_ Ibuki.”

Something flickers in Tokoha’s eyes, and she seems unable to stop the flash of pity on her face. Chrono’s knuckles fall onto his lap.

 

 

 

The facts were these: young Chrono was 8 years, 2 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 8 hours, and 27 minutes old when a new neighbour moved next door to his house in a suburb in Tokyo. While the family who lived next door was in no way new, the child they were fostering was indeed a newcomer. Young Kouji Ibuki was 14 years, 9 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 3 hours, and 54 minutes old when he was taken under the care of yet another one of the many foster families he’d had the chance to meet. Only, by the destiny sewn into the stars, this one family happened to be neighbours with the friendly Shindou family.

By virtue of Tokimi Shindou’s homemade pies and the foster family’s lack of attention, young Chrono and young Ibuki ended up spending a lot of their time together in the Shindou family’s livelier home. For reasons unknown, Rive Shindou hadn’t been present inside the residence for years on end, and in his place was his younger sister and young Chrono’s aunt, Mikuru Shindou. This, however, only served to increase the welcoming atmosphere in the house.

Young Chrono loved his family, and, as a matter of course, so did young Ibuki.

Until one day, when a blood vessel in Tokimi’s head burst, and she fell dead onto the floor, apple pie in pieces on her feet.

Young Chrono stumbled into steps beside her, unbelieving, and raised a hand to shake her shoulder. She was not breathing, because she was dead, and in a feat of grief young Chrono cradled her face.

Young Chrono was special, not only because he was a star student and a beloved son and nephew and a treasured friend, but also because he could touch dead things and bring them back to life.

Tokimi opened her eyes, and she was alive again.

Young Chrono knew not of this ability of his until this very moment, and he sat stunned on the floor as his mother hurried to clean up the spilled pie and returned to cook as if she had not been dead merely seconds ago.

But the one thing young Chrono was aware of at this point was: relief and palpable happiness, and it seemed life was going to continue on as it should.

Another thing he didn’t know was: this ability not only gave, but also took. You could not bring someone back to life for longer than a minute without a consequence, and this consequence was another life taken.

For Chrono, it was in the form of his father’s corpse on their porch. In this particular universe’s map, on the day Rive Shindou decided he was going to go home and apologise, young Chrono unknowingly exchanged his life with Tokimi Shindou’s.

Of course, it did not stop there. Like all things, this ability had more than one consequence. Should a dead thing that had been brought back to life by a touch, be touched again for the second time, it would die. Dead, again, forever.

Young Chrono learnt this with the goodnight kiss Tokimi had given him after a teary afternoon of a loss of father and husband and brother. She had fallen into heaps after the peck—dead. She never woke up a second time.

And thus young Chrono became an orphan. Mikuru Shindou was already considered an adult, and she took custody of her nephew without an ounce of hesitation. However, she could not afford to keep the house, and her guardianship came with a condition: a move to a smaller apartment in the city centre, where she would work for the two of them.

Young Chrono was intelligent, and he knew it was a small price to pay for the continued survival of a young child.

Young Ibuki thought so as well, and waved goodbye at him from his foster home, now neighbour to an empty house.

 

 

 

“A childhood friend.” Tokoha breathes, gritting her teeth. She rests her forehead on the wheel. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Chrono asks. The tips of his fingers are numb, and he stares unseeing at his friend. In the back of his mind, he hopes he’s been in a dream. Most of his dreams tend to be about his father’s ghost, but this isn’t that far behind in the traumatising territory.

“Okay as in we are still going to the morgue, and you are going to slip in whatever last things you want to tell him before you re-dead him. It’s a chance only you can take.”

It is a chance only he can take, because he is the only one with the ability to reanimate the dead, but it is also a curse, because it comes with the need to re-dead a precious acquaintance of the past. You can only lose so much before you lose yourself.

“No.” Chrono says.

“No?” Tokoha eyes him, but there is no force or fire in that gaze. For once, she is not jagged edges and demands.

“I’ve never truly gotten over seeing corpses.” Chrono says, staring down at his hands. “I don’t think I will ever recover after seeing Ibuki’s.”

 

 

 

The facts were these: that had not been the last meeting between young Chrono and young Ibuki.

For nearly five-going-on-six years, they had allowed themselves the chance to stay in correspondence with each other. Young Chrono’s letters to young Ibuki were a hit-and-miss, because the young man had kept being transferred along foster home after foster homes. But young Ibuki was nothing if not a keeper, and he knew to always send his letters to Chrono’s unchanging address.

Young Chrono was 14 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, 14 hours, and 10 minutes old when he received a note stuffed in his shoe locker. The sender was a 20 years, 1 month, 1 week, 4 days, 6 hours, and 18 minutes old Ibuki, who had finally gained his own stability and rights, and so chose to spend his first day in the city reuniting face-to-face with someone whose shared childhood had been one of the brightest periods in his life.

Even so, Ibuki could not stay, and had left to do whatever he was doing for a job for months on end.

The world loved balance, and in this balance Chrono found that Ibuki always paid back his moments of non-presence with promised returns. The young man would leave and he would come back—and always come back he did, and welcome him Chrono did.

When Chrono was 19 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 2 hours, and 37 minutes old, Ibuki left with a _see you_. It was the one time his promise never came to pass.

 

 

 

“Maybe it’s not him.” Tokoha tries, but even she sounds unsure, ebbs of discomfort. “Maybe it’s someone with the same name. Who knows, maybe it’s common enough?”

Deep down, Chrono knows, through the hole in his chest, the void in his ribs, that there is no coincidence that kind. Deep down, he can feel the emptiness from the loss of Ibuki’s presence in his life, in his world, in his existence.

 

 

 

The only ones in the world to know of Chrono’s ‘gift’ were Tokoha Anjou and Kumi Okazaki. And as things seemed to always turn out in this calculated timeline of this particular universe, the reveal had been one and the same.

The older Mikuru Shindou became, the more responsibilities she held. And resulting from one of many side businesses she had partnered with in the past, she gained ownership of a small building wedged in between skyscrapers. Overflowing with the desire for independence, Chrono (at the time 17 years, 11 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 12 hours, and 56 minutes old) convinced her to give the management of the building to him, and within months he had turned it into a restaurant and a living space for himself.

He took up baking pies, courtesy of memories of his mother, and opened Pie Leap.

His first employee, and currently the only active one, was Kumi Okazaki. She was a classmate of his back in secondary school, and she had remained a good friend to him to this present.

Tokoha Anjou was Kumi’s life partner, and, indeed, her introduction to him had been made through their mutual friend.

It happened like this: Tokoha was a private investigator, and like any other private investigators, she was chasing a criminal across the rooftops of skyscrapers. Chrono was a pie-maker and restaurant-owner, and it was part of his duties to throw the garbage into the collection point. Kumi was a waitress, and when met with a significantly difficult order from a similarly difficult customer, she had followed her employer into the alley to ask for assistance.

The criminal—one jewel thief—slipped off the ledge of the next building he was supposed to leap onto, and, in a mixture of bad and good luck, fell to his death by slamming his head on the large garbage bin in that same alley, and then came back to life by tossing his body backwards into a startled pie-maker.

Well—a mixture of bad, good, _and_ bad luck, he supposed.

Chrono reached out before he could run out of the alley, and the criminal dropped dead, again, forever.

Kumi had watched on, blinking. She seemed to have been trying to say something else when she caught sight of Tokoha, gaping down from the top of the building, and took it as a timely opportunity to introduce her life partner to her terror-filled employer.

Later on, across a table with milkshakes and half-eaten pies, Tokoha had invited Chrono into a collaboration. After all, murders are so much easier to solve when you can ask the dead who killed them.

Chrono had only agreed because their compromise stated that he could deliver the victims’ last messages to whomever they were meant to be while Tokoha could divide the reward between them however she wanted.

Chrono had no need for money, but he would hold onto sentimentality.

 

 

 

And sentimentality, one and only, is the thing standing between Chrono and Ibuki’s last words for him at this point of time. (Heretofore known as ‘now’.)

“I don’t know if this is what you want to hear,” Tokoha says, turning off the engine of the car. In the silence, her voice sounds louder. “But, if reports are to be believed, then Ibuki’s corpse is intact. Barely any blemish.”

“Can we—can we not say corpse, please.” Chrono whispers. It still sounds loud, even with the ringing in his ears. “And—that’s good. That’s good.”

Tokoha’s smile is sad, and it’s erased just as quickly. “Not what you want to hear, though?”

Chrono’s lips are trembling. “No. Not at all. What I want to hear is his voice, telling me he’s alive and this is one big April’s Fool joke.” It is April, but it’s not the first day in the month, and the wind hits harshly against the windows. “All I can see in my head now is his face when he said goodbye to me four months ago. I don’t—I don’t want to replace that with the image of his—his—you know.”

“I know.” Tokoha says, gently, like the chirp of a bird. She taps on the wheel with her index finger. “We can just not take this case, then, if you want. I understand if you want to back down.”

Chrono puts his hands into a tent and breathes into the triangle, eyelids pressed against fingers.

He has never put stock into revenge, and doesn’t think trying to avenge Ibuki’s death will result in anything he will not regret. He’s learnt that death is permanent since he was young, and cheating the circuit of the universe only gives multitude of inconveniences that will only backfire. He’s learnt that there’s no take-back, and all things return to ash, eventually.

He’s just never thought Ibuki would be burnt to ashes this soon.

“Okay.” Chrono says, pulling his chin up. “Okay as in let’s go to the morgue and do our thing. I have to tell him I love him.”

Tokoha looks startled. “Are you sure?” She leans forward, closer. “Is that going to interfere with our ‘thing’? Your feelings.”

Chrono gives her a wry smile. “I hope not. I’ll tell you when we get there.”

“Not reassuring.” Tokoha whispers, but she revs the engine, anyway.

 

When they arrive at the morgue, Chrono starts wheezing. He can’t breathe but he is breathing too much at the same time, and it’s Tokoha’s hands on his back and arms that bring him back up. It comes in slowly, droplets of reality and tears.

“This is a bad idea, after all.” Tokoha says. Chrono tries to press a finger onto her lips to keep her silent, but fails.

“I have to tell you something.” he says instead.

At the end of his explanation, Tokoha purses her lips, cheeks discolouring. Chrono supposes it’s natural—after all, hearing about the conditions and consequences of his supposedly ‘wonderful gift’ must be a topic deadly enough to tread on, moreover understand.

“You’re going to keep him.” Tokoha says. She sounds sure, convinced, a still water. Chrono wants to thank her for always finding the meaning of his words.

“That’s not the word I would want to use, but you got the idea.” he says. “Although it’s more like—I don’t think I will be able to stop myself. So I need you to stop me, to drag my hand and get me to touch him before 60 seconds pass.”

Tokoha scowls, pinching the bridge of her nose. She looks tired, worried, but none of the expressions Chrono doesn’t want to see is on her face. “Saying it as if it’s that easy. You won our last lifting battle, Chrono. You lifted 5kg more than I did. You think I can win against your grip strength?”

Chrono rubs at the back of his neck. “Well. Maybe this is a good time as any to exercise?”

Tokoha rolls her eyes. Without a word, she kills the engine and steps out. Chrono scurries after her.

Stood before the gate of the morgue, hand on the handle, Tokoha turns to look at him, and it’s as if this is the first time she has ever laid eyes on him, heart and soul.

“This Ibuki,” she says, pronouncing the name like it’s something precious, like she is holding a diamond. “You love him so much that he is worth another person’s death to you?”

Chrono’s traitorous mind opens to an image of his father, not-alive on his porch, and a separate image of his mother’s smile, in the short hours in which she was alive again. No human being will ever be able to be exchanged for another—no human being’s life is worth the same as another’s. Equilibrium doesn’t mean you can steal someone else’s future for the sake of your own selfishness.

“If I could give my life to him,” Chrono promises, “I would. In a heartbeat. Without question.”

Tokoha’s eyes linger on him, and there are a million things that can come out of her mouth—a million of which can hurt him. Instead, she hums, and presses her thumb on his wrist, where his heartbeat echoes.

She keeps holding onto him as they walk down the corridor and into the coroner’s office. The lights are dim, and Chrono would’ve liked to comment on it had he not already known who the coroner is and how much said coroner likes to make his own working space as disconcerting as possible.

Legs crossed on the table and lab coat haphazardly thrown across his swivel chair, Shinonome the coroner looks up with a grin on his face.

“Oh, hello,” he purrs. He seems incapable of doing anything in ways that are not inherently creepy. “Nice to see you again, Sir Crime Specialist.”

Chrono tries not to mind the obvious jab at their first lie, which they’d come to regret not weeks afterwards, because Shinonome always says it like he knows the truth. “Good afternoon to you too, Shinonome-san.”

Tokoha, intent on not dealing too long with their mysterious coroner, slips a roll of paper money into Shinonome’s shoes on the table and drags Chrono with her to open the morgue’s door. “Which one is Kouji Ibuki’s?” she asks, obviously dreading having to speak with him.

Shinonome sounds amused, if anything. “His name is on the plate. Number 16.” And then, as if he just has to do something disturbing in exchange for five whole seconds of decency, he adds, “Don’t kiss the sleeping beauty, Sir Crime Specialist.”

Chrono fixes him with a bug-eyed look before Tokoha shoves him into the morgue and away from the chronically creepy coroner with a full-bodied shudder.

They stand in front of Number 16 for a full minute. Tokoha has offered to pull it open for him, and Chrono has let her. In return, Tokoha lets him uncover the body, to pull on the fabric and show Ibuki’s breathless face into the world. For them, right now, the world is a pure white morgue, and the population is made up of two people.

Two people and a dead man about to be revived for 60 seconds or less.

“Let’s,” Tokoha gulps, “let’s get it all sorted out first, so we won’t waste any time. I will ask him if he knows who killed him, and then you can have the rest of what time is left to talk to him. Is that okay?”

“Yeah.” Chrono says. Instead of a mess of unsaid words and unconnected meanings, his mind is blank. The words he wants to tell Ibuki are on the tip of his tongue.

Dead like this, Ibuki looks soft—boyish, even. Chrono takes in a breath, letting the last memory of young Ibuki’s timid smiles wash over him.

“Here goes?” Tokoha asks.

“Here goes.” Chrono nods, and reaches onto the back of Ibuki’s hand.

Ibuki jumps awake, almost slamming his head into Tokoha’s. He is breathless for another reason now, groping at his own naked body in disbelief. When his eyes find Chrono, he stops blinking.

“I’m supposed to be dead.” he says, still staring at Chrono as though the younger man would disappear if he were close his eyes for even a second.

“Um, incredible self-awareness there, Ibuki-san.” Tokoha says. She’s circled Ibuki to stand next to Chrono, hoping to catch his attention. “You are. We only have 60 seconds.”

“60 seconds?” Ibuki repeats.

“55 seconds now.” Chrono whispers, eyes darting quickly from his watch and to Ibuki’s own gaze.

Tokoha claps her hands—both a nervous tic and a cry for attention. Ibuki snaps a look at her in surprise. “Okay, so you’re dead. Do you know who killed you?”

“Ryuzu.” Ibuki says, touching his sides, trying to find something. A spot on which the electricity that killed him is, maybe. “Ryuzu Myoujin. Head of the Association. I thought it was only a taser.”

Tokoha blinks, and then hisses. “That’s the Yakuza! Not to mention Myoujin is, like, the top dude. What did you do to him that made him decide to kill you himself?”

Ibuki lets out a laugh. “I’ve been trying to dismantle his organisation for years. I just barely managed to hold together a resistance. Maybe he finally decided I was too big a threat to keep alive. Took a precaution and left a note on me in case anyone from the resistance would try to get on my case.”

Chrono’s breath hitches. “Is that what you have been doing all this time? Whenever you left? A vigilante group?”

Ibuki seems to melt into his voice, holding onto Chrono’s words like a lifeline. But he says “I took up a duty someone else entrusted to me,” with an undercurrent of steel.

Chrono waits for a sorry, for Ibuki to apologise, because apparently fighting off the criminal underworld had been his entire living purpose, and Chrono is left with pieces of small meetings and sleepovers and promises instead.

Tokoha, trying to take advantage of the remaining time and silence, asks, leaning towards Ibuki. “No way we can expose your murder to the police, the Yakuza will kill me before I can even say ‘reward’. What did you plan to do with what’s left of your wealth in the bank?”

35 seconds.

“Give them to Chrono.” Ibuki says. “Anonymously. They will transfer everything to Chrono’s account when the deadline comes. My own account will be deactivated, and Chrono won’t even notice what he will have inherited.”

“Wh—why?” Tokoha’s fist clenches. She is trying to unravel Ibuki, trying to understand him like she does Chrono. “You’re—it’s like you’re trying to erase yourself. How would Chrono ever find out you were dead, then?”

“He wouldn’t.” whispers Ibuki. He lifts his hand carefully, and then splays his fingers in Chrono’s direction. In the gaps between his fingers, Chrono’s face twists with pain. “He doesn’t deserve to receive more deaths in his life. He will have thought I was gone, leaving him behind. Better than thinking I was dead.”

Tokoha glances back at him, and there is a _please_ on her lips.

“I think I touch more dead people than you’d want me to, Ibuki.” Chrono says, glaring at the love of his life. There is anger and there is sadness and there is a plea for _this can’t be the end_.

“I would want you to touch zero,” Ibuki replies. He looks scolded, but he does drink in the warmth of Chrono’s presence like a thirsty man on a desert.

“Today I touched one,” Chrono sobs, dry of tears, “and it’s you.”

18 seconds.

“Hm,” Ibuki purses his lips. He pushes closer, but makes no attempt to touch Chrono. He seems to want to settle on the hem of Chrono’s jacket, but even he doesn’t let himself do the simple motion of grasping. “Small privileges. Good memory to bring to the afterlife.”

“Are you serious.” Chrono fumes. He wants to explode, but what he wants more is for Ibuki to say anything else but acceptance to his death. What comes out of his mouth is this: “I love you. I have always loved you.”

Ibuki jolts—a bodily reaction—and sucks in a breath—a sign of life. His shock is a living thing so real that Chrono finds himself drawn into the heartbeats that complete him.

The love of his life—dead 50 seconds prior, and will be dead again in 10 seconds—stutters, blinking fast. His eyes shine and reflect the blinding white walls of the morgue, almost like the marbles they used to play together in the Shindou’s house.

“Chrono!” Tokoha shouts, a static in the sea of his heartbeats. “Chrono! 7 seconds!”

“I know.” Chrono mutters, and as his eyesight becomes smudged, blurred with tears, he picks up his hand, index finger inches above the back of Ibuki’s hand.

“Sorry,” Ibuki says, between this second and the next, flipping his hand over so carefully so Chrono would touch his palm instead, “I have always loved you, too.”

Chrono doesn’t hear Tokoha’s scream. He pulls his hands onto his chest and throws himself backwards, crumpling onto the floor. There are half-moons on his palms, and tears on his knuckles.

-2 seconds.

“Chrono?”

For a moment he doesn’t dare to look up. He doesn’t question the voice that has just said his name, because he can recognise the owner so easily, like finding a siren in stormy seas.

Ibuki is alive, because Chrono refuses to touch him, refuses to re-dead him, and now someone else will take Ibuki’s place. They will die instead of Ibuki, who shouldn’t be able to stay.

Chrono breathes through his nose, and waits, waits, waits.

“How do you know you’re safe? How do you know you won’t die because _a certain someone_ chose to keep dead man here?”

Chrono coughs, and then laughs. Tokoha’s arm slips around his shoulder, squeezing. Like this, he can feel her trembling, violent against his own still form.

“If you’re not already dead now, then you’re safe.” he tells her. Slowly, he tries to lift his head. The overhead lights flash, and he closes his eyes. “Maybe it’s that coroner instead.”

“Good riddance, then.” Tokoha says. She’s gripping at her own wrist, teeth chattering.

Chrono smiles at her. “You don’t really think that.”

Tokoha waves a hand at him dismissively, cringing. “There’s a difference between wanting someone to die and them actually dying.”

“Yeah.” Chrono blinks one more time. Ibuki’s eyes find his the next time he opens them. Under the white lights, Ibuki almost looks angelic. “So now I have to take responsibility.”

He stands up, keeping an arm distance between himself and Ibuki, who is staring at him in equal ratio confusion and blankness. Tokoha, ever helpful, situates herself between the two of them.

“Ibuki,” Chrono says. There is relief and guilt and _sorry sorry sorry_. “I’m doing something terrible here, and it’s because I want to talk more with you.”

The sides of Ibuki’s eyes crinkle—more confusion—but he replies, “I want to talk more with you, too,” and it’s with the same confidence of leading a resistance group against the city’s strongest Yakuza’s members.

“I want to talk with you forever.” Chrono says. He’s been thinking that, has been putting that down in his list of things to write down as part of his wedding vows—a dream of his childhood, an imagination of his teenage years, and now an impossibility as an adult. “I don’t want you to die.”

“But I died.” Ibuki says. He turns to Tokoha. “Right?”

“Not anymore, because _love_.” Tokoha says with the corner of her mouth, a half-whisper.

Ibuki eyes her uncomprehendingly.

Chrono takes a step closer, folding his arms behind him. “You’re alive now because I brought you back to life with my touch. You will die again when I touch you a second time.”

“Okay.” Ibuki says. His shoulders roll back, fingers intertwined on his own lap.

“I don’t want you to die.” Chrono says. He wants to slow things down, somehow. Maybe, then, he can register the short inhale of Ibuki’s breaths a bit better. It’s small spurts of oxygen, damning whoever died in Ibuki’s place. “Do you not want to die as well?”

“I don’t—” Ibuki inhales. “I don’t mind death.” He says it like he knows it’s true, like it’s a truth that is ingrained and grown in his heart. The next thing he says, however, is just as sure. “What I mind is leaving you behind. I never got to apologise for never being able to stay.”

Chrono inhales. “So do you?” he hesitates. “Do you want to stay?”

Ibuki smiles. It’s a tiny thing, discreet and only there if you’re Chrono and you’re used to reading through a beloved childhood friend. “I do. All the time. I wish I’d never left.”

“Okay,” Chrono tries to smile, and fails. His heart is too full, and it throbs against his ribs, rapid and unforgiving, and it _hurts_. “Okay. Please stay.”

Ibuki tries to reach out, but catches himself in time. He regards Chrono with sheepish eyes. “No touching, then?”

“No touching, ever.” Chrono whispers back. “I will keep you alive.”

“Um, thank you.” Ibuki says, pulling on his legs. “That’s the right thing to say here, right? Thank you for bringing me back to life?”

“Yeah.” Chrono wants to cry. “Yeah, you’re welcome.”

In the end, it’s Tokoha who brings up the current problem at hand. “We need clothes to smuggle a dead man out of here.”

“Oh, I have a lot in my locker. No worries.”

Chrono and Tokoha’s eyes snap to the entrance, where chronically creepy coroner Shinonome is leaning on the threshold, examining his own nails. Ibuki tugs on the fabric covering his body out of instinct.

“Well, he’s alive.” Tokoha observes. “Then who died?” she directs this question at Chrono, arms raised in demand.

Instead, it’s Shinonome who replies. “One of the visiting surgeons upstairs had a heart attack. Sudden, too, that. Didn’t make it.”

“Oh god.” Tokoha and Chrono say in unison.

The facts are these: Shouma Shinonome has just begun to find his life as a coroner boring and monotonous when a private investigator and her friend who claimed to be a specialist of crime came to stuff money in his pockets and poke at corpses. Out of boredom, and with a lack of conscience, Shinonome had spied on them and watched the ‘crime specialist’ resurrect a dead person with a touch. He’d been aware of the young man’s ‘power’ for months, but didn’t bother to inform the people involved with said knowledge, choosing instead to sit back and enjoy the show.

This doesn’t explain how he managed to work out what said ‘power’ entails, but he does give a secondhand set of clothing for Ibuki to wear, and merely waves them goodbye with a “see you around”.

Ibuki sits himself in the back seat as Chrono eyes him, trying to cover every inch of his skin just in case, and Tokoha keeps talking on the wheel, mourning over the fact that now there’s no escaping that chronically creepy coroner if she wishes to keep working.

“So you’re alive again.” Chrono says.

“It still doesn’t feel real.” Ibuki tells him.

Chrono smiles sadly. “I would hold your hand and tell you it’s all real and not a dream, but I can’t.”

Ibuki’s hand jerks as he tries to stop it from reaching out. “I understand.” He inhales. “But I’m alive.”

Respectfully, Tokoha stops complaining to allow them silence. In the constant hum of the engine, Chrono can almost imagine it’s the sound of Ibuki's heartbeats dancing with his. They’ve just exited a white world of two (and one dead) and into another of millions (all alive).

In the grand scheme of things, they are insignificant.

“And you’re with me.”

“And I’m with you.”

The facts are these: in the grand scheme of things, there is nothing more significant than each other.

**Author's Note:**

> i dont know if im going to ever get around to expanding this fic's universe but hey. heres hoping


End file.
